For the Love of the Jewels
by Koi Lungfish
Summary: Yuffie character vignette: about her mother, her motivations, and her feelings about Materia.


Title: For the Love of the Jewels 

**Author: **Koi Lung Fish****

**Disclaimer:** Based on characters and situations from Final Fantasy VII (© 1997, 1998 Square Co., Ltd). Used without permission. Text © 2001, Koi Lung Fish (Mark of Lung. All Rights Reserved.)

**Subject: **A character vignette on Yuffie, her mother and her reasons for stealing Materia.

            Mother was a faded face. Mother was a photograph.

            Open your hand; receive the last of her love as she recedes, crumbling under the gentle fingers of daylight.

            Mother was a silhouette. Mother was a desiccation.

            She stood against the window, outlined by the flares; bright fireworks spat from the belching cannons. Her face was a paper mask, made up by coloured light from the sizzling impacts that hissed around.

            The death of the country, the death of the nation; death as the blood of the Planet was sucked out by mosquito siphons that fed the malarial cannonade.

            Mother faded like dry flowers. Mother wasn't made for war.

            Rain of blood, they vomited on our country. Sucked up all the goodness from the soil and spewed it back, rank with bile and greed.

            (Hush, Yuffie; anger is unsightly)

            They came for our land, the homeland we loved; they took all our wealth, wealth we would have missed if they hadn't torn the heart out of the country.

            Bright fire, green in the night. A thousand shooting stars celebrating every birthday night.

            Mother was a clever machine, made of rods and springs; she smiled, and I never saw her heart dying. Day by day she faded out, eclipsed by the monstrous gloom, the choking cloud of dust from army boots where last year bright birds flew.

            My summer land, all green and golden, the land of my childhood, slipped between my fingers as mother drifted away.

            I close my hand and make a fist; round and hard, a girl-child fist.

            (Hush, Yuffie; tears are ugly)

            Mother always made me stay away from the windows, stay away from the threads of pearls that cometted across the sky. Children can be so naïve; I thought the ShinRa guns saluted my birthdays.

            Mother was a painting on a screen, so thin she was transparent.

            I might have been beautiful – I might have been a princess, in my silk and fine brocade – but those future dreams choke-withered under a smoke-blackened sky; magical girl-dreams were swamped and drowned by the dreadnoughts of nightmare as they invaded my sea of sleep, captained each by a green-eyed demon with a sword fit to split the heavens from the earth.

            Mother said I should not dream of death, that such dreams are bad for little ladies: as if my circumstances of birth could bar the General from my dreams.

            She feared the General more than I; she understood acutely the dread that man inspired. Every night, she and I shared our waking nightmare: green contrails across the lich-ghast moon became midwinter eyes in a pallid face, maned with clouds, his silhouette a barren mountain barring a third part of the sky from sight as his skeletal hand reached out and plucked the howling stars from the firmament to throw down upon us; his reign of awful light.

            The General invaded out dreams as he invaded our land, driving us from sleep to wake to fever, eyes as luminous as mako-cannon barrels primed to fire, mouth open in a snarl that consumed our world. He was the figurehead of ShinRa, the captain of nightmares, the hungry death of our nation. He rose against the horizon of our minds like the end of the world, armoured fist outstretched to snuff the sunrise.

            He was a man who could outreach our gods: he sundered Leviathan from the sea and veiled him behind a caul of crystal; martyred the Mighty Gods upon a pyre of warriors' bones. Godlike, the arch-exctinctor tore all vivation to flinders.

            Mother would weep whenever his name was mentioned; I think she feared his masculine brutalities, although even in my youth I understood that death is a gentle man.

            When Mother heard the General was bringing his troops and his guns to claim our final stronghold, our final bolt-hole, she went out into the garden and braided her hair into a rope that reached her ankles.

            She hung herself from the cherry tree: when I found her, she was covered in blossom. Gentleman death had brought her flowers.

            Mother died of heartbreak, Mother died of pain when the green-gold land was burnt to cinders.

            (Hush, Yuffie; swords are not for little girls)

            I would give every ruby in my veins, all the ivory of my bones, the garnets and sardonyx in my flesh. I would give the jewellery of my life to have back my green and golden land, where parrots like the dreams of poets beaded the branches of the mangrove trees, and coral bracelets with forked tongues sparkled amongst lianas the size of pythons. I would give my very heart and soul to return to my childhood land: cedar-trees drip with floral quartz confections there, each field a treasury of grassy emerald and malachite shoots, inlaid with lapis-lazuli by reservoirs that mine the rolling sapphires wherein lazy opal catfish hide beneath the jade-leafed lotus orthoclase: koi - agate ornaments jewelled with jasper, inlaid with seed-pearl scales - swim in obsidian-deep ponds under turquoise skies: the sun is gilded, brilliant with diamonds and glancing platinum rays to lick the verdure - smouldering with beryl viridescence, all a-song with iriscent birds - with a glittering tongue, setting lakes ablaze with cerulean sparkles.

            Enough, says Mother, come away from the window. You don't want to watch.

            Don't watch as my soul burns.

            Don't watch as war chews up my father's generation for the necessary centennial feast.

            Don't watch, Yuffie, your homeland has been slaughtered. Don't watch as they bleed it dry.

            Mother is dead; desiccated, dried out like the barren land where the rice-paddies used to step, like toy lakes for organised minds.

            Open your hand, and see the soft lines of childhood fade as adult bones, adult strength rises to vengeance' call.

            The hand makes a fist, snared full of blossom; the end of beautiful things.

            The hand makes a fist.

            Childhood's beauty dies in adolescent April. My green-gold land is gone: Wutai supine on the life-support of tourism.

            The fist is raised to strike.

            I will take from them, as they took from me. I will take the gems that give them wealth, the gems of crystallised life that can replenish my land.

            They have taken my land, my mother, her blood.

            They have not taken my life, my soul, my fist, and as long as I live I will live to take their pretty jewels; their Materia will return the blood of my country; gems of Materia for the gems of memory.

            This vengeance, mine, for the love of the jewels that live now only in memories.

            The fist strikes, for vengeance, for memory, for the childhood that died with mangrove smoke and roasted parrot, with spitted catfish and oil-scummed ponds, with fields of ash and fields of salt, with verdure smouldering under shrouding clouds of cinders.

            Blossom flies as stone shatters.

            Childhood ends with the hardening of hands.

            For the love of the jewels.

**Author's notes & addenda:**

            Gift vignette for Alline Aspire, who was the first person to understand the double meaning in "The House of Corridors." The last three lines were supposed to be a haiku, but I couldn't get what I wanted into the 5-7-5 syllable format. So it's in 7-10-7 instead, which is what I get for trying to be clever. Feedback excruciatingly welcome.

**Email:** spacepriest@dial.pipex.com


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